


running for a soft place to fall

by Selador



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family Feels, Female Harry Potter, Found Family, Gen, Harry Dresden Needs a Hug, Harry Potter Needs a Hug, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Magic, Minor Hermione Granger/Harry Potter, POV First Person, POV Harry Dresden, Self-Indulgent, Slow Build, Suicide Attempt, They all need hugs, Worldbuilding, don't i have enough WIPs? no it's never enough, except the baby is a teenager, harry dresden tries to be the adult he needed at 17, indian bisexual disaster girl harry potter, wrote this for me and the two friends interested in this niche crossover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2020-07-29 02:59:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20075011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selador/pseuds/Selador
Summary: A death curse wouldn’t stop this thing. But I have to try. I just have to… keep it together. Pull my magic up under my skin, and ready to release it as soon as the final blow came…Of course, that plan gets shot to hell when it asks, in a hoarse voice with an English lilt to it, “Why are you naked?”





	1. The Outsider

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from "Runaway" by Aurora.

Trapped inside a summoning circle isn’t how I thought I’d die. Definitely a possibility, but call me arrogant, I really thought I’d be taken out as too great of a risk rather than brought in alive as a sacrifice. I’m not typically considered good sacrifice material, unless the thing this coven of warlocks are trying to summon require a significant offer of magical power to appear.

Which is… not good for me. Not good for anyone.

I’m also naked, and for the first time, I understand why Murphy and Susan hate the scantily-clad damsel in distress trope so much. This is so demeaning. I complained, loudly, to the three warlocks about at least leaving me my underwear for some dignity, and the assholes didn’t even react.

Which was honestly creepier than the whole being naked in a summoning circle thing. And also? A very bad sign for my chances of survival. Getting me naked to humiliate me is one thing, doing it to keep me as helpless as possible without my enchanted clothes and rings?

I’ve gotten myself out of a lot of bad situations, but hopelessness lies heavy on my chest. Even for me, this doesn’t look good.

The stones beneath me are damp… and sticky. The lighting in the room is pretty terrible, but the discarded corpses in the corner of the room don’t leave much ambiguity to what I’m lying in.

You might be wondering how did I, Harry Dresden, a fairly powerful wizard if I may toot my own horn a bit, wind up in this situation?

It started with a case, and as you might be able to guess, the case went sideways.

A woman named Tina Smith came to my office two days ago. Her sister was missing, but the local cops didn’t believe she left unwillingly because, in Tina’s words, “They’re racist fucking assholes.” The sister in question, Winifred Webster, may also be a practitioner of small minor skill.

“Strange things happened around her, but nothing too inexplicable,” Tina told me. “She had really weird dreams sometimes, and they--you’re going to laugh.”

“I advertise as a wizard in the phone book, I promise I won’t,” I reassured her.

“Fred got visions,” she whispered. “But it’s been getting worse lately, and weirder things have been happening around her. Things shorting out. Stove fires. That sort of thing.”

That sounded enough like a minor talent turned warlock to get me on the case. As I tracked Fred’s schedule the last day she was seen, I started encountering other missing persons. Following my gut, I spoke to their loved ones and got enough out of them to determine that someone or someones were kidnapping practitioners of increasing talent. And, considering the amount of time between the disappearances, they were probably being given a warlock recruitment speech with promises of power. When they bought into it and went, they were betrayed and sacrificed to whatever the kidnappers are trying to summon.

I don’t know what kind of Outsider it would be, which would require a sacrifice of magical talent, and I really don’t want to find out.

But it looks like I’m not going to have a choice.

I tense when one of the warlocks walk behind me. Tied up on my side, head aching everywhere from overusing my magic trying to stop these guys, I can’t twist my neck enough to keep him in my line of sight. “Stop,” I beg, because there’s nothing else to do but beg now. “You don’t want to do this.”

The warlock in the circle with me scoffs. “You have no idea what I want,” he says, as he leans over me with a knife. I flinch and ready my death curse, and hiss when he drags the knife across my chest. And again. And again. Again. Again.

Five times total. A solid, prime number for magical things. The warlock pulls away and leaves without slitting my throat. Bemused, I try to see what he carved on my chest. Any movement stings on top of the whole body ache that I’m going through, but I make out a circle with a line through it in a triangle.

I focus on it, to commit it to memory so I can show it to Bob later. If there is a later. The warlock didn’t slit my throat and let me bleed out into the summoning circle, so that makes me the savory snack for whatever they’re trying to summon.

I take a deep breath to quell the rising panic, but it doesn’t do much good. The warlocks have formed a triangle formation, and closed the summoning circle.

I’m trapped.

They begin their chant. I struggle against the chains they’ve got me in, not that it’ll help, but, you know. Panicking. I was really hoping they’d just slit my throat. I don’t want to see the gaping maw of whatever is going to eat me. Definitely one of the most nightmarish ways to die.

The candles lighting the room blow out, because of course they do, and the only light is from the portal that’s just opened in the room. It’s bright and green fire above me, crackling and hissing, and it’s hard not to look at it.

Justin DuMorne had summoned an Outsider, but I didn’t see the summoning when I fled from his home as a teenager. I banished it, but… this was different. I twist away from the fire, though the summoning circe doesn’t give me much leeway. Not that it’ll do much good, but there has to be something I can do. Something I can use.

It’s the noise that makes me look back to the portal. A high-pitched noise, that starts quiet and almost indiscernible, but grows louder and louder until it’s in the room with us. The fire twists and changes and disperses, leaving behind a screaming Outsider.

Stars and stones. It looks human.

It’s never good when a creature takes on the appearance of being human. Shapeshifting to that extent and maintaining a believable form takes an immense amount of power, which is very bad news. Like with the Red Court vampires, I also find it particularly disturbing that monsters can so easily hide behind a beautiful face.

Power cackles within the summoning circle, and I see actual sparks in the air in front of me from it.

The Outsider isn’t the same one Justin had summoned. At least there was that. Part of me always thought that it would find me again.

It stops screaming, kneeling on the floor, wild, jet black hair obscuring its face. When it looks up, I’m caught by its inhumanely bright green eyes and a white, lightning shaped scar stark against its dark skin on half of its face.

And of course, the wave of power that crashes down on me, filling up the summoning circle with its will. The magic in the air so thick I could choke. I barely catch my breath before another wave of magic, this time focused to a razor-sharp edge surrounded me.

A death curse wouldn’t stop this thing. But I have to try. I just have to… keep it together. Pull my magic up under my skin, and ready to release it as soon as the final blow came…

Of course, that plan gets shot to hell when it asks, in a hoarse voice with an English lilt to it, “Why are you naked?”

Good-bye focus. My magic dissipates under my skin, and I try to ready it even when blinking up to the Outsider. My mouth is dry but fear has made me sweaty. And also the naked thing. I don’t have a lot going for me at the moment.

“Why are you naked?” it asks again. Still with the English accent, but not as proper or refined as the Oxford one like the demon Chauncy likes to sport.

“They took my clothes,” I say.

“Master of Death,” booms the only female warlock of the three. At her words, the candles around the circle light themselves providing the most dramatic amount of light possible. “We have summoned you here. Accept our offering and bind yourself to our will.”

“Your offering?” it repeats. The Outsider slowly gets to its feet. I can see its bright green eyes through the curtain of its messy hair.

“We offer to you a sacrifice,” says the warlock who cut the symbol in my chest. “A wizard of immense power.”

“Consume him,” says the third warlock. “Feast on his power and then we shall bring this world to its knees.”

“Whoa, wait, why don’t we talk about this?” I say, before the Outsider can decide to go ahead and do exactly what the warlocks are suggesting. Its not bound to them yet, so they can’t command it to do anything. Its options are eat me or go back to where it came from, and… stars, I don’t want to die.

“You should have gagged him,” the female warlock snaps behind me. The Outsider’s eyes flicker to the warlock, to the corpses, and then to the circle keeping it--and me--contained.

“Oh, who cares?” the one who cut me responds. “He’ll shut up when he’s dead.” The Outsider’s attention snaps away from the runes of the circle to me, and I try to squirm away.

“‘Sides, we know you like hearing them scream,” adds the third warlock. Cheekily, because I’m about to die, and they’re bantering.

“I’m gonna fucking haunt you!” My heart is thudding so hard in my chest it almost hurts. The Outsider stare is weighty and physical, and I don’t want to see my death coming, but I can’t look away. “I’m going to haunt your ass. I’ll never shut up! I’ll annoy you for the rest of eternity!”

The warlock snorts, and says something, but I don’t hear it at all because the Outsider stumbles towards me. It moves like it’s unused to walking, but the space within the summoning circle is small. A few steps and it’s standing over me. I watch, frozen, as it sinks to its knees next to me.

A hand reaches out to touch the mark on my chest, and I flinch back so hard that I strain something. The Outsider doesn’t react, just smears some of the blood around and pulls its hand back, rubbing its between its fingers. There are black markings on its wrist and palm, but I can’t make out the symbol in the dim lighting.

If it licks its fingers as some sort of horrific taste test, please, for the love of all that is magic, just let me pass out so I don’t have to see this.

The Outsider reaches to my wound again, this time making the cuts sting as it gets more blood. Its movements are slow, deliberate, if a bit unsteady. When it shoots its hand out to the side and shouts “Makt,” an invisible force shattering through the summoning circle and throwing the warlocks off their feet, well, I’m as surprised as anyone.

“Diffindo,” the Outsider yells, and blood spurts out of the neck of the warlock that cut me. The female warlock shrieks and stones in the wall fly out toward the Outsider--and me, since it’s still kneeling next to me. The Outsider mutters, “Protego,” and the stones shatter against an invisible shield.

The third warlock, who had just gotten to his feet, gets stoned to death by bricks not stopped by the shield. The female warlock gapes in horror at what she’s just done.

I’m gaping too, but mostly at my surprise that I’m not dead yet. The Outsider gets to its feet, facing the last warlock.

“You killed all of these people?” it asks.

The warlock tries to run instead of answering. The Outsider sighs. “Stupefy,” it says, almost lazily. The warlock drops like a rock. With a wave of its hand, chains appear around her.

The Outsider steps over to the corpses and leans down to them. To my shock, it seems like… it’s checking if any of them are alive.

They’re not, but why would an Outsider care?

It sighs again, and stands up with the weight on its shoulders. It turns to me.

“Hi,” I muster. I swallow hard and try to think of something, anything, to follow that up with.

“And what do I do with you?” it asks.

“Let me go?” I suggest. “Whatever you do, don’t eat me. Definitely would not recommend that. I’m, I’m a stick, and you really have to spice meat for it to have much flavor at all, and there’s a great burger place nearby that has the best curly fries, and I don’t know about you but a burger and fries beats raw meat any day.”

The Outsider stares at me, and I stare back at its scar, avoiding eye contact out of habit. It’s probably wise to avoid its gaze anyway. “I could really go for some fries.”

“Hell yeah,” I say. And then, Wait a second, did it just say it wants some fries? “Wait. What?”

“Fries and burger sound great,” repeats the Outsider. With a wave of its hand, the chains on me are gone.

“Oh! Oh, shit, awesome,” I say. Babble. I’m flying by the seat of my pants at this point, and I don’t even have pants. Speaking of, my whole dick is out and I’d really like to fix that. “Let me just--just find my clothes, hang on.”

My clothes are in a pile in a corner of the room. The warlocks cut some of them off, but my underwear, pants, jacket, and boots are fine. I back away from the Outsider without turning my back to it as best as I can, but more or less abandon that as I hurriedly dress. I feel a lot better once I have my enchanted, protective jacket on, but that’s nothing compared to getting my pants back on. It really sucks to be naked and surrounded by bad guys!

My hands shake a bit while I dress, and it takes a couple tries to do the button on my pants. The Outsider doesn’t pay me any mind, walking around the room which has to be someone’s basement. There are stairs by the wall going up, a boiler underneath them, and washer-dryer units on the opposite side of the room.

Fuck, I can’t believe I almost died in a basement. I glance towards the corpses by the circle and sober up immediately. Several people did die in this basement. Because I didn’t get to them in time.

“Okay, clothes. Much better,” I mutter to myself, breathing a sigh of relief. Clothes mean I can face the creature from the Outside with that much more dignity. The Outsider is poking at the washer and dryer for some reason. Although it previously used magic without a focus, it now had a short stick in its hand. It wasn’t a staff or a blasting wand.

“Where are we?” it asks me.

“Uh, a basement,” I say. The Outsider does a very good impression of Murphy when she’s sick of my shit, and I continue, “Chicago. What’s, uh… what are you called?”

“Harry,” it says, and I startle. It knows my name? How? When? The warlocks knew who I was when they grabbed me, but they didn’t say it during the ritual? Did they? Stars and stones, the Outsider shouldn’t be able to do anything to me with part of my Name, right?

“How’d you know that?”

It blinks. The green of its eyes aren’t as distressingly bright anymore. “Know what?”

“My name,” I say, frustrated.

The Outsider speaks slowly, like I’m an idiot. “But I don’t know your name, mate.”

“I--” I say, realization cutting me off. “Your name is Harry?”

“Yup,” it says, popping the p. “A wild shot in the dark, is your name Harry, too?”

“Ye-yeah.” Outsiders don’t… have names, as far as I know. They have titles, like He Who Walks Behind. If they have names, they keep them well guarded. “The warlocks called you the Master of Death.” That’s one hell of an alarming title.

It shrugs, rubbing the back of its neck in an embarrassed way. “It’s just Harry.”

“Okay,” I say, thinking, about a lot of things. Like how there’s no way an Outsider is really called Harry, how a title like Master of Death doesn’t just happen, and how to get out of here alive. Fortunately, I have a way to figure out the last one. “I think there’s some burgers and fries I owe you.”

“What should we do with…” it trails off, but gestures towards the warlock and the corpses.

“I’ll call someone when we’re out of here,” I say, and flinch at my own stupidity. The Outsider hasn’t killed me yet, but telling it I’m going to call back-up?

“Ah,” it says, dropping its arm. “Okay.”

“Okay,” I repeat. When it looks at me, I grin and wave to the stairs. “After you.”

It frowns but walks up the stairs anyway.

Following behind a comfortable distance, I consider the matter at hand. An Outsider with a human’s appearance is walking free and unbound. I can try to bind it to my will, but it blasted through a closed summoning circle like it was nothing. Even if I could make a circle strong enough to contain it, I don’t have the time or resources on me to make one. I’d also have to trick it into the circle, and somehow I doubt it’ll be as complacent about that as it’s been so far.

And it has been surprisingly complacent. Sure, it killed a warlock, but not the other two. Maybe I could reason with it. Because I, Harry Dresden, am so charming and diplomatic.

Shit. We’re totally fucked.

The house we’re in is blessedly empty and dark. Unlit candles litter the counters, presumably because the warlocks figured out the hard way that more power meant no more electronics. Sure enough, the light bulb in the kitchen sticks out of the holder with sharp, broken, jagged edges. The glass had been cleaned off the floor, but the warlocks clearly hadn’t gotten around to taking out the broken light bulb.

The Outsider finds the door out without any problems. Modern houses are not a conundrum to it, but I don’t know what information gets to the Outside. Or what the Gatekeeper does, exactly.

Speaking of the Gatekeeper, he’d need to be notified about these fairly average sorcerers becoming powerful enough warlocks to summon an Outsider successfully. It took them a few tries, sure, but they did it. Of course, the White Council hadn’t cared about the details last time I was near a warlock summoning an Outsider. Even though I didn’t kill anyone this time and I didn’t summon the Outsider, they may not leave me with my head long enough to explain.

I’d like to keep my head attached to my body. I admit that’s a strong personal preference of mine.

A niggling voice in my head protests at the thought of calling the White Council. And, sure, drawing their attention to me for any reason usually spells bad news for me, but that doesn’t explain the wrongness I feel.

I take a breath loud enough that the Outsider turns to look at me. In the threshold of the house framed by the darkness of the night, it almost seems like just a girl.

I meet its green, green eyes. I mean to tell it where we’re going, but I’m hoping for some sort of plan would reveal itself before inflicting the Outsider on innocents like that.

So the soulgaze comes as a surprise.

I’m pulled into the ocean, rough waves making it difficult to keep my head above water. Rain pelts my face, and I can’t see in the darkness. The water pushes and pulls and pummels me as it wishes, and there’s nothing I can do about it. A flash of lightning arcs through the sky with a BOOM that shakes me to my core. There’s no land in sight, only the storem growing bigger and more furious, water threatening to drown me--

I’m flung backwards and pinned against the wall by an invisible force. I gasp while the Outsider--no, not an Outsider, a wizard--demands, “What the bloody hell was that?”

“Soulgaze,” I rasp, the pressure against my chest barely letting me breathe. “You have a soul.”

“Of course I have a fucking soul,” the wizard snaps. “Was that--was that even a question?”

I hesitate with the spell forzare on my lips because while it might work and give me some breathing room, it may piss of the powerful wizard who has me trapped. “Outsiders don’t have souls,” I explain, rasping and trying to move in any way to ease the pressure. “I can’t breathe.”

The pressure vanishes and so does the support keeping me up. I crumble to the ground, drawing in deep breaths.

When I look up, she asks, “Why did you think that I was an Outsider? What is an Outsider?”

“Those… those warlocks downstairs summoned you from beyond the Outer Gates,” I tell her cautiously. I stand up, which makes me feel infinitely better. Even knowing the power she’s wielding around like it’s nothing, it’s hard to be frightened of someone who’s more than a foot shorter than you. “The creatures that exist beyond the Outer Gates are called Outsiders. There aren’t supposed to be wizards there.”

“Witch,” she corrects. “I’m a witch, thank you.”

“It’s wizard here,” I say. “Regardless of gender. Witch is usually used for like… small-time practitioners.” Harry the Wizard (and Not Outsider) frowns, but I push forward to the question really on my mind. “Are there wizards living beyond the Outer Gates? Or did those idiots fuck up their summoning and pull you from England or something?”

Actually, messing up the summoning and pulling some poor wizard from their home would make a lot more sense than a wizard popping out of the Outside.

“I’m from England,” answers Harry the Wizard and Definitely Not Outsider. I run a hand through my hair when I realize fuck I have to help this wizard get home, and the thought that she killed someone with magic she broke a Law crashes through everything else.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Okay,” I say, “we can… we can deal with this. Who’s your master?”

Harry blinks at me. “What?”

“You’ve had some training,” I snap, impatient and frustrated. “So you’re someone’s apprentice. Who is it? I can make some calls, get you back home, but--” She broke one of the most important Laws. When the Wardens investigate the basement and the corpses, they’ll-- “Shit, kid. You killed someone with magic.”

“I… yeah, I guess I did.” Discomforted but the full implications of her crime don’t seem to be settling in as they should. “I needed to keep us both alive, so I… you know.”

“You broke a Law,” I tell her because how could she not realize this? “The Wardens are going to figure it out, and they’ll--” I swallow hard at the thought of steel at my throat. “--They’ll kill you for it.” I had just seen Harry’s soul. She doesn’t deserve execution. Abuse from her past had left an obvious mark on her soul, but one day she could be a storm.

“The Wardens?” she echoes. “Who are the Wardens? I’ve never heard of them.”

“How could you not? They have Wardens in England.” They have Wardens all over the world. There’s nowhere to go to escape them, which no one knows better than me.

Harry frowns, brows furrowed. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Ministry of Magic?”

“What? No. Is that and English thing?”

“What about Hogwarts?”

I stare at her in disbelief. “What kind of name is Hogwarts?”

“I’ve never met a Warden before,” she declares. “You’re American, aren’t you? Where are we in the Americas?”

“Chicago,” I tell her. “Kid, I--I’ll try to help you, but you used magic to kill someone, and the White Council doesn’t look lightly at that kind of thing, no matter the reason.” Pulling the zipper of my duster closed up to my neck against the chilly wind coming through the open door, I add, “My help might make it worse. The Council doesn’t like me at all.” If I testify in her defense, they might just execute us both. They would see it as evidence that I’m involved in another magical death.

“What the bloody fuck is the White Council?” asks Harry, voice rising in distress. “It’s not a White Council that runs American wizarding society! It’s the Children of the Earth or something!”

“Children of the Earth?” I repeat.

“Well, that’s just the English catch all, but I don’t know any of the indigenous languages or even all of their Councils,” she tells me, voice taking on a more scholarly tone. “Native American witches don’t tend to fraternize with English witches, for obvious reasons.”

I gape. “I’ve never heard of the Children of the Earth.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of your White Council,” she snips with a desperate gleam in her eyes. “So one of us must be wrong.”

That’s… fair, actually. “You’re the one who came through a portal,” I tell her. Still pretty sure that green fire wasn’t a pretty portal just to England, but I also don’t want to upset the powerful wizard who might actually be an Outsider somehow. And Harry--it’s pretty weird to think of another wizard as Harry--looks like she might be about to fall apart of the seams. In fact, she’s biting her lips and her eyes grow shiny like she’s about to cry, and I’m not sure if I can handle a crying girl right now.

You know what helps with that? Food. “Hey, I promised you a burger and fries, right? There’s a great diner not to far away that’s got the best curly fries.”

Wiping her eyes and taking a breath, she says, “I know. You said that earlier.” She swallows, and says in a stronger voice, “I’d love some curly fries.”

…

We get some curly fries. And burgers. And milkshakes. Harry inhales the burger like she’s starving, but slows down when she’s munching on her fries.

“So,” I begin, “where were you before the portal brought you here? Were you in England?”

She shakes her head. “No, I was… somewhere else.”

“Where?”

She shrugs, taking a bite of a fry. Occasionally, she touches her pocket where her magic wand is. I’m still not quite sure how reliant her magic is on a focus. I saw her perform powerful magic without one.

I tap the table top anxiously. “Look, this whole situation sucks, but I want to help you. I need to know what happened.”

Harry sighs through her nose, finishes chewing, and swallows. “I was somewhere else. I don’t know where.” Her eyes drop down to the table and go distant. A peculiar expression overtakes her face, sending a chill down my spine. Once again, I wonder what happened to her. For the first time, I wonder if this is what I looked like after what happened with Justin.

No teenager should ever have that expression on their face. Not me, not a teenaged girl.

Realization hits me so suddenly that I begin choking on my fries. Coughing and making a racket, I hear Harry startle and ask if I’m okay.

“No, I’m not okay!” I admit I might be yelling at this moment. “I was naked! You saw me naked! I was naked around a teenaged girl! I flashed an innocent teenaged girl!”

“Holy shit, mate,” says Harry quietly. “Shut up! It’s not a big deal!”

“I’m a sex offender!” I say, entirely too loud. It’s been a rough night, I think I should be forgiven for freaking out. Harry kicks me under the table, probably to get me to shut up, but my legs take up so much space it still could have been an accident. This late, the burger place is pretty empty, but there are people working and sitting around starting to look over their shoulders at me. Shit. Last thing I need is for the cops to come to try to arrest me.

“I’ve seen dicks before!” says Harry. “And it’s not like you wanted to be stripped and sacrificed! You didn’t really have a choice in the matter!”

I rub my forehead to stave off a growing headache. “Okay. Okay. Let’s never speak of this again.”

“You’re done freaking out?” asks Harry. At my nod, she says, “Deal.”

“Okay, so you were somewhere else,” I prompt.

“Yeah,” she responds. She’s got a fry in her hand but isn’t eating it. “It wasn’t… wasn’t good there. And then the portal opened. I got pulled out here.” She shrugs. “That’s all I got, mate.”

“Okay, so where were you before?”

Her lips thinned. For a moment, I think she would lie or refuse to answer, but she answers, with great hesitance, “England. The Ministry of Magic, specifically. I was… we had just--the war had ended, and--”

“War? What war?” I demand.

“The Second War,” she says, which is news to me. Well, there is no such thing as a Ministry of Magic, only the White Council. If there was anything beyond the Outer Gates, it hasn’t reached us before. And what Harry’s describing sounds just like Earth, magic and all, but with a “Mirror, Mirror” kind of twist.

She could be an extraordinarily powerful Outsider, but she has a soul. Outsiders don’t have souls.

And based on what I saw of her soul, as crazy as it is, I don’t think she’s lying.

“A wizard named Voldemort was trying to take over--”

“I’m sorry, Voldemort?”

“Yeah, it was an anagram of his name. Tom Marvolo Riddle.” She pushes her bangs out of her face and avoids eye contact while she continues. My brain tries to take Tom Marvolo Riddle and turn it into Voldemort, and it doesn’t match up. “He got defeated once, but came back fourteen years later for another go. I was fighting in the war to stop him.”

“But you’re a kid,” I say.

She shrugs, zoning out again, going all thousand-yard-stare.

“Hey,” I say, snapping in front of her face. She doesn’t respond, so I repeat it louder. “Hey, Harry Jr.! Anyone home?”

She startles and gives me a panicked expression. “What did you call me?”

“Harry Jr.,” I tell her calmly, “I’ve got seniority, obviously.”

“I’m not a junior,” she protests, sounding for the first time like an actual teenager.

I look down at her because even sitting down I have almost a foot on her. “You look pretty junior from up here.”

Harry Jr. makes a wordless sound of indignation when I reach over the table to ruffle her already plenty messy hair. To my delight, it turns out that her hair retains additional messiness.

Scowling is infinitely better than whatever trauma she was revisiting, so I’m pretty pleased at the result.

The scowl slips off her face, visibly retreating back into herself. I clear my throat. “So, how’d this war end?”

“We won,” she says in a small and miserable tone that sounds nothing like winning at all. “But it--it didn’t solve anything, you know?” Swirling a fry in some ketchup, she goes on in a completely broken tone that alarmed me. “The system was completely corrupt. It was ruining magic. Our magic, and others. Do you lot have house elves here?”

“House elves?” I repeat. I’m almost certain that we don’t because no member of the Summer fae would allow themselves to be called house elves. “No, we don’t.”

“They used to be nisse, which are household spirits. They have a few different names in Scandinavia, but they were later called brownies in the United Kingdom. They attach to and protect a family. They’re benevolent, powerful, and very sweet.” She must know some personally. “Wizards where I’m from, wherever that is relative to here, enslaved nisse and… corrupted them, for lack of a better world. Twisted them from the wild and kind magic that they had and tried to chain and control it.”

Well, if nothing else, there’s no way Harry Jr. is from this world. Heads would already be flying left and right at this Ministry of Magic if that were so. Because that sounded like a mass thrall of an entire species. “So you won the war? How did you get beyond the Outer Gates?”

“Yeah,” she says with barely a voice at all. “Deep in the Ministry of Magic, there’s the… the Veil. No one knows where it leads, but no one who’s gone through it has ever come back.”

“And you went through this Veil?”

“Yeah,” and adds nothing more, slipping away again. Okay, that gives me the impression that one of two potential events happened. Option A, someone forced Harry to go through the Veil in order to kill her. If it’s a war, it’d be an effective way of disposing of people with no mess and little effort. Or Option B… she stepped through the Veil herself in order to kill herself.

I am not a tactful man, but even I’m not that much of an asshole. “Has anything ever come through this Veil?”

A pause. “No. At least I don’t think so.”

Well, that’s fascinating. “So you guys don’t have Outsiders?”

Shrugging, she says, “I’d never heard of any before ending up…” Harry Jr. shudders, “...there.”

Definitely not going to push on that right now. “Okay, so you go through this Veil, and find yourself in this elsewhere,” I sum up. “Then the summoning happened and pulled you here.”

“In a nutshell,” she nods. She swallows hard. Discomfort is in every line of her body. “I’m--I’m very far from home, aren’t I?”

She is. And if what she’s saying is true, and I’ll have to speak to Bob about the theoretical likelihood of such a thing, she went through the Outside to get here. Harry Jr. lived in one world, a version of Earth, went through what constituted their version of the Outer Gates, and through fortune and happenstance, came out on this side.

Harry Jr.’s not going to get home. What she’s claiming is impossible, and even if she finds a way back into the Outside, she’d have to survive to navigate back to her world, and it doesn’t sound like this Veil lets people back in.

“It’s going to be alright,” I tell her instead, trying for a reassuring smile.

“What am I going to do?” Harry Jr. whispers. “I don’t--I don’t know anything about the magic here, I don’t know anyone here, I don’t have a place to live--”

“Hold on, hold on,” I say, putting up a hand in the stop position. “Don’t panic. You know me, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I turned a teenager out onto the streets. I have a couch that you can sleep on. You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”

Shaking, she shakes her head.

“Great! I have a giant cat named Mister. He’s an asshole, but he’s great.” Harry Jr. still seems on the brink of a breakdown, but it’s not as imminent. “I can give you the rundown about magic here. I do that for any newbies who come my way anyway. It’s going to be alright.”

Harry Jr. lets out a shuddering breath. “Okay. Okay.”

…

Getting back to my apartment is a hassle. The warlocks snatched me from a different place in the city, so I don’t have my car. Public transit is unfortunately out of the question with an emotionally volatile teenaged wizard in tow.

So I used the phone at the burger joint to call us a cab. It’ll deplete my cash, but that’s a problem for tomorrow.

We get to my apartment. I invite her in, which causes a brief and a bit perplexed explanation about thresholds and how magical beings can’t enter homes uninvited without crippling themselves, which led to an outburst of “But we’re not vampires!” which is going to be a fun conversation later. With a wave of my hand and a “Flickum bicus,” the room is illuminated by candlelight. Just in time, too, to see Mister headbutting into Harry Jr.’s knees in an attempt to topple her.

It doesn’t work, and Harry Jr. crouches down with a small smile on her face as she scritches Mister’s head.

“That’s Mister. He’s in charge,” I tell her.

“Hello, Mister,” she says to the cat. “I’m Harry Potter. It’s nice to meet you.” Huh. Kid has better manners than me. At least, that’s what I think until she murmurs, “‘Flickum bicus’? That can’t be a real spell.”

“I assure you, it is. A Harry Dresden original,” I answer. The clock on the wall reads that it’s almost four in the morning. “I’ll set up the couch for you.”

“Where’s your loo?”

“My loo? Oh, over there.” I extract sheets, pillows, blankets from a closet, nearly causing all of my linens to tumble out. I shove them back in and get the couch in order.

And I wait. I want to go down to my lab and start talking to Bob about all of this, but I want to make sure Harry Jr.’s settled before I do that. Being in a stranger’s home would make anyone uneasy.

Mister makes himself comfortable on the couch where the kid’s going to sleep. Oh well. I’ll let her take care of that. When she comes out of the steamy bathroom in pajamas, jacket in hand, her eyes are rimmed red and she looks completely miserable. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do when a teenaged girl I’m taking in for the night clearly cried in the shower, aside from respecting the fact that she did so in privacy for a reason.

Also, I’m immediately super distracted by something else entirely.

“What’s the steam from?”

She gives me a baffled look. “From the shower, of course. Oh, did you know your hot water doesn’t work?”

“Yes, I know that,” I answer slowly. “The hot water heater never works because of my magic. Magic makes electronics short out.”

“Does it?” Her eyebrows raise, disappearing into her messy fringe. “Where I’m from, it’s not that electronics don’t work with magic. They do, they just become a bit sentient over time.”

“Stars, really?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says, bobbing her head eagerly. She walks over to the couch and starts petting Mister, who begins purring loudly. “My friend’s dad had a car that could drive itself. It saved our lives when a family of acromantulas wanted to eat us.”

That sounds incredible, but--“Family of what now?”

“Acromantulas.” Seeing my continued confusion, she adds helpfully, “Giant spiders. An entire colony of them lived in the forest next to my school. My friend Ron and I ended up in the forest and had to run for our lives. We wouldn’t have made it if the Ford Anglia hadn’t help us helped us escape.”

Well, that’s only extremely terrifying. Also a lot to unpack. “Wait, that doesn’t explain why you had hot water for the shower.”

“Oh! Right. I enchanted the pipes so I could get hot water.” Completely misinterpreting my expression, she says a bit meekly, “I can remove it if you’d like?”

“Hold that thought,” I tell her, getting up and heading to the bathroom. I turn the hot water on and stick my hand in the spray. It’s so hot it hurts.

Well, holy shit.

I turn on my Sight to look at the enchantment she put on the shower. It’s fine work, but not overly complicated. I couldn’t do it--I don’t have the amount of control necessary for such delicate spells.

“Definitely leave the enchantment there,” I say as I go back into the living room. “That’s a handy enchantment.”

“Yeah. Can you not do something like that?” she asks. She’s scooted under the blankets around Mister until she’s cuddling him.

“I’m more of a heavy hitter, magic wise. I’ve got a lot of juice, but I can’t do spells that require a soft touch. If I tried to put an enchantment like that on my shower, I’d have burned down the bathroom.” Scanning the living room, I can’t think of anything else she might need. “You good?”

She nods. “Thanks, Mr. Dresden.”

“Just Harry is fine.” I smile at her, and I’m about to extinguish the candles when a thought occurs to me. “Hey--where did you get the pajamas? You didn’t have anything with you, and I definitely didn’t have a girl’s PJs lying around.”

“Oh--I transfigured them from the clothes I was wearing.” She picks at the collar of her shirt. “I’ll turn them back tomorrow.”

“I--are they clean like that?”

“Well, I hit them with a few scrubbing spells, so technically, yes. Do they feel as good as properly laundered clothes? No, but that can wait.”

“If you want, I can give you a t-shirt and throw those in the wash for you,” I offer.

The kid hesitates. There’s a wariness there that makes me starkly aware that I have a teenaged girl alone in my apartment. “No, that’s okay. I’m fine like this.”

“Alright, that’s fine,” I tell her, backing up a step. I try to smile, but I’m not sure how reassuring it was. “Have a good night. Let me know if you need anything.”

I extinguish the candles at her soft “good night.” I head to my bedroom to wait for a bit. I need to get to my secret lab in the sub-basement, but the problem with a secret lab is that I can’t go into it if a wizard from another world is on my couch and still keep it a secret. I wait about half an hour before peeking out into the living room to check if Harry Jr. is still awake. By all appearances, she’s fast asleep.

Well, that was easy.

I don’t feel great about it, but I cast a light sleeping spell on Harry Jr., just so she doesn’t wake up when I open up the trap door to my secret lab or while I’m down there. And on the plus side, it’ll keep her sleep dreamless for tonight, which she desperately needs.

I move the throw rug covering the secret entrance, and open the trap door. I double-check that opening the door didn’t somehow wake up Harry. With that confirmed, I head down and close the door behind me to keep the noise level contained.

“Hey, Bob,” I say, “wake up, we’ve got work to do.”

Two glowing orange lights manifest in the skull on my counter, which yawns. “What’s happening, boss?”

“What do you know about Outsiders?” I ask, then launch into an explanation of the events over the night. When I finished, Bob manages to give me as much as an incredulous expression as a skull can.

“Well, boss, you’re never boring, I’ll give you that,” he says. “You’re completely sure this girl came through the portal?”

“Absolutely.”

“And this portal was to the Outer Gates? With green fire?”

“Yeah. Is that a sign that the portal’s to the Outer Gates?”

“It’s one of them,” Bob says. “If she’s not a really clever and powerful Outsider, and since she has a soul, it doesn’t sound like she is. Then I would consider it possible that there are other worlds connected to the Outside through their own Outer Gates. But it’s never been heard of before.”

“But it’s the most likely option,” I say, rubbing my eyes and yawning with a pop.

“It is,” Bob admits, as reluctant as can be. “If it’s true than it opens up worlds of possibilities, ha! But, Boss--I’ve never heard of it before. Seems astronomically unlikely.”

Letting out a long, deep breath, I consider our options. “Would bringing her down her for you to get a look at her aura help at all?”

“All that’d do is confirm whether or not she’s an Outsider, and you’ve already soulgazed her. So it wouldn’t do much.”

Rubbing my eyes again, I check the clock. Almost six. The sun’s going to rise soon. “And at the end of the day, I still have a powerful teenaged wizard who has nowhere to go.”

We mull this over together in companionable silence. “Well, what about the warlocks?”

“What about them?”

“Were they hot? At least? Come on, you said they stripped you down, you can’t tell me that and not give me details!”

“They wanted to sacrifice me to an Outsider!” Offended, I stand up. “Level of hotness doesn’t permit human sacrifice, Bob!”

Bob groans. “You’re no fun. Throw me a bone here. You could at least spice up the story and tell me that the female warlock undressed you.”

I cross my arms. “The female warlock was the one who liked to hear people scream as they die.”

“Some people are into that, but I suppose dying does make the whole thing less sexy.” Bob sighs. “Wait, I don’t think you said what happened to her. Did Harry Jr. up there kill her too?”

“No, she just--oh, fuck! I forgot! We left her tied up in the basement!”

Bob laughs as I run upstairs to get to my phone.

…

I give Eb a call to let him know about the warlock that needs arresting. Lying to my mentor always makes me feel like I’m a teenager again, so I don’t lie. If I imply that their ritual didn’t work and the warlock went nuts and killed the other two, well, still not a lie. Technically.

Then I finally go to my bed and pass out.


	2. Off to the Library

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Anything can blow up if you believe in yourself,” she says as reflex. Taking in my alarmed expression, she clears her throat. “Um, it’s not going to blow up. I’ve done this many times before, and I’ve only blown things up like three times. And they were all on purpose!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter: discussion of suicide

A course of action makes itself clear by the time I wake up well into the afternoon. Harry Potter is a powerful wizard, strong enough that any number of people would want to get their hands on her for their own purposes. Wizards at her age and with her level of power have to apprentice under fully-fledged wizards, but her current knowledge of magic and the world would quickly reveal her origins. If the White Council didn’t kill her, they’d use her as a weapon without a doubt.

I rub my throat to chase away the memory of Warden Morgan’s blade cold touch on my skin.

I don’t want her to go through that. 

To my surprise, Harry Jr. is awake and up when I exit my bedroom. She’s making eggs on my stove, which is funny because my stove isn’t connected to the gas line. 

“Whoa, whoa, wait,” I say, rushing over. I turn off the stove and demand, “What are you doing?”

“Making breakfast,” she says, voice small. “I just--I just thought I could--”

“I can’t have the stove hooked up or it might _explode!_” I pull out the stove to unplug the gas line. My reaching hand freezes in the air when there’s nothing to unplug. “What?”

“I didn’t plug in the stove, I just put used some bluebell flames on the stove top,” says Harry behind me. She lifts the pan off the stove, blue fire shining merrily underneath. She puts her hand in the flames before I can stop her. “It’s not dangerous. They’re not hot enough to be.”

“Oh,” I say because _oh_. “Bluebell flames?”

“Yeah, they’re called ‘cold fire’ sometimes, but they’re not cold, just not very hot. They can burn clothing, for example.” Moving her hands away, she adds, “They work for cooking most of the time.”

I take a deep breath and step back. “You don’t have to make breakfast.” The very idea reminds me all too much of Justin.

She places the frying pan back on the burner. “It’s the least I could do for--”

“_No_,” I interrupt. Harry stares at me a bit wide-eyed and recoils a bit away from me. _Shit_. I take a step away and lower my voice into a more even tone. “You don’t owe me anything, okay? I’m helping you because it’s the right thing to do.”

Shoulders tense and with an unhappy expression, Harry nods. “Okay.” And that’s that, but I have no idea what else to say. It’s the answer I wanted, but feels like a misstep. She clears her throat. “I was hungry. You don’t have to have any.”

I bark out a laugh in surprise. “Have as much as you want.”

She takes a little over half the eggs and leaves the rest to me. The eggs along with some toast that she made with a couple of floating bluebell flames complete the meal. 

“So,” I say as we sit down to eat at my small, dinky table. It’s so old I don’t even remember where I got it. It was probably free on some curbside. “Where did you learn to control your magic?”

Buttering her toast with precision, she answers slowly, “I learned at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.”

“Is _that_ what Hogwarts is?” I ask. “Okay, wait. What kind of name is Hogwarts?”

“A _good_ one,” she snipes, tensing up again and glaring. “Where did _you_ learn?”

“Missouri,” I answer honestly. “I apprenticed under another wizard. We don’t have schools for wizardry here. There’s not enough of us in one place for it. Generally, if someone’s powerful enough, we know them by name. There’s not _that_ many of us.”

Her brows furrow. “Really? But that’s… so few.”

“How many wizards were in your world?”

“I mean, my school had about a thousand students? And we have a couple shopping districts in London that were hidden. And an all-magic town by the school,” she adds on like that’s not a mindblowing amount of power in one place, like a tinderbox just waiting for a spark. Trying to imagine being in that town makes me physically shudder; too much unknown magic in one place and I’d never rest. “There’s also a bunch of tiny little hamlets all around the UK. My parents lived in a village like that when I was a baby.”

“That sounds… nice,” I say. I’d lived alone with Ebenezer McCoy, working on his farm all day and learning magic in the evenings. Eb had been a hard taskmaster, the lethal threat of the Doom of Damocles hanging above _both _of our necks never far from mind. I’d learned, that’s for sure. 

I’d hated it and left as soon as I could. If Eb had liked having an apprentice at all, he probably would have made me stay for the standard couple decades before announcing that the apprenticeship was complete. But I wasn’t an easy teenager to deal with, and Eb never wanted to take care of a kid, anyway. 

“It was nice,” says Harry wistfully, falling into a somber mood. “So how do I get home?”

The expression on my face tells Harry the answer to that question before I can try to deliver the news in a more gentle manner. The determination on her face hardens, with the same look in her eyes as when she fought the warlocks. “I have to get home,” she says. “There has to be a way.”

“Listen, kid--” 

“Don’t call me a kid!” she yells, standing up. “I’m not a kid! I’m a _witch,_ and a damned good one at that!”

Raising my hands up in a pacifying way, I say, “Okay, okay, I won’t call you a kid. But stop to think about this. You went through a portal into the Outside, right? And you survived in the Outside, which I didn’t even know was a thing before you, until summoners _here_ pulled you out. To get back home, you’d have to get back to the Outside which, and correct me if I’m wrong, doesn’t sound like a fun place.”

She shakes her head slowly, blinking a lot. “It’s not.”

“So you’d have to get there, and stay there, and find a way back to your world. Has anyone ever come through this Veil of yours?”

Biting her lips and very much looking ready to cry again, she shakes her head.

Even if she ends up in tears, I need to drive this point home. Or else she might do something really stupid, like trying to get back to the Outside. “So no one’s gotten through the Veil. Unless someone manages to perform a summoning at the exact right place and moment, you’d be stuck in the Outside until you died.” I take a deep breath while that sinks in. “And that’s if everything goes well with no unexpected surprises, and the Outside is _full_ of surprises. You got lucky once, possibly the first person ever. You’re not going to get that lucky again.”

Harry stares at the table, face blank. I would have preferred tears since I have no idea what’s going through her head. The silence envelops us, and I return to my now cold scrambled eggs. When Harry speaks, I’m startled enough to drop my fork in surprise. 

“I was trying to kill myself,” she says. “We won the war, but so many people died for me. And then… they wanted to go back to the way things were. Me and Hermione and Ron, we… protested. A lot. Does your lot have a prison?”

“Ah,” I say, with great compassion and intelligence because I definitely am not panicking over a teenaged girl telling me she tried to commit suicide. “No. We don’t.”

“We had a prison. It was guarded exclusively by dementors, monsters who feed on happiness and warmth. They suck it right out of you until you give up on life. And then they give you a Kiss.”

“A… kiss?” I ask, panic still coursing through me with no clear action in sight. The way she said _kiss_ makes my gut clench. There is no way that was a good thing. 

“They eat your soul.”

“Oh, empty night,” I say. “And these things guarded your prisons?”

“Prison. Just one. Azkaban,” she looks down at her hands. “My godfather had been sentenced to Azkaban for twelve years. But he was innocent. He never got a trial.”

That’s… horrifying. 

“It wasn’t right. That kind of thing couldn’t be allowed to happen again. So after we won the war, we fought our own government. The more we fought, the more we realized how corrupt our magic had become with our own arrogance and imperialism.”

“Like with the nisse?” I ask. “Which you talked about last night.”

“Like with the nisse,” she confirms. “So I went to our Ministry of Magic and tore it down. I just. Demolished it.” That would take a frightening amount of power. “And then… I went down to the Veil. And I walked through it. I wanted to die. I thought I was going to.”

“And you didn’t. You’re still here.”

She shrugs. “I didn’t know here existed until I stumbled into it.”

I breathe in. And out, because I still have no idea what to say. “Are you… do you still want to…?

Her mouth twisted, upset. “I want to go _home._”

“You can’t,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Harry’s face tilts down, her fringe covering her expression. Her breathing deepens, her chest visibly expanding and contracting. 

I wait until her breathing settles down to say, “It’ll be alright. I’ve got a plan. I’ll take you on as my apprentice, so you don’t catch any unwanted attention. That way we have time to go over what you need to know to survive here and what will get you into trouble.”

Her face shoots up, bright green eyes wide. “What? Why would you do that?”

“There are a lot of people in the world who would want to take advantage of you. Of your power,” I explain. I cross my arms over my chest, but let them hang at my side when Harry Jr.’s eyes narrow at me suspiciously. I’m not quite sure how to appear not suspicious. “And your gaps in knowledge, like thresholds and electricity, that’s going to be hard to explain. If you’re my apprentice, we can catch those gaps before anyone else notices something odd.”

“But why would _you _help _me_? What do you get out of it?” She’s getting angry and wary, leaning back in her chair. 

I can’t blame her for being suspicious. I know all too well what it’s like to have a problem with authority figures that’s justified by experience. And like last night, I’m all too aware of how _bad_ this situation might look to an outsider. (Outsider. Heh.) But I don’t know how to convince a teenaged girl that I am trying to help her.

“Fuck, kid, I’m not going to hurt you,” I say. “If certain people find out that you came from the Outside, they’ll kill you. Or worse, take you prisoner and mold you into a weapon. There are creatures out there who’ll enthrall your mind until you obey their every command. I can’t in good conscious send you off on your own without a way to defend yourself.” She also has nowhere to go; no home, no friends, no family. As bad as Justin was, having nothing and no one in the world for you is an unspeakable kind of loneliness. 

“I guess that’s fine,” she says after a long narrow-eyed stare. I’m not used to maintaining eye contact, but I try to appear genuine. Which I am, but being genuine and appearing genuine are two different things, and most people assume I’m untrustworthy. “I don’t… I don’t have a place to live.”

“You can stay on my couch,” I say. “Apprentices usually live with their masters, so that’ll be fine.” It’s not an ideal set up, but aside from giving up my own bedroom for the couch or converting the lab into a bedroom which would mean that I don’t have a lab, we don’t have many options. 

I guess I could set up a cot in the lab for myself, but that couldn’t be a long term solution. I could look for a two bedroom apartment, but I need money for that. A new apartment wouldn’t have my current threshold and wards, which would make it very unsafe for both of us. 

The couch is really the best option until I can think of something else. 

Harry Jr. frowns. “Can’t I make myself a bedroom?”

Okay, I have no idea what that means. “What?” 

“Just, you know, enchant the space to be large and transfigure up a doorway… and… room stuff.” She trails off, eyeing my face. “Can you not do that?”

I cannot. I know of some transmutation experts who have created real life Bags of Holding, but none who can permanently increase the amount of space in a room. I mention that it is possible that I simply haven’t heard of it.

“Wizards here don’t share knowledge without a price,” I explain, leaning against the back of the couch as I watch her cast her spells. We had to move a bookshelf out of the way so she could have a place to make a room next to the fireplace. The position mirrors mine. She murmurs the spells quietly, so it’s hard to catch what she’s saying, but it sounds like Latin. “They only pass down what they know to their apprentices. Any notes they have are carefully kept secret or guarded.” 

“But you’d lose so much knowledge,” she says, breaking to inspect her work. The door frame and door are a good match for the others in my apartment. “Someone would have to discover it all over again. What’s the _point _of that?” She jabs her wand forward to emphasize her point, and the space behind the brand new door frame grows. I get up to watch better as Harry Jr. creates a room and makes it bigger. 

The growth is not consistent, but rather staggered, much like inflating a balloon with your breath. 

“Why not do it all at once?” I ask. 

“It’s safer like this, less likely to collapse on me,” she says. “You don’t want a space that doesn’t exist collapsing. Baby steps, one foot and then the other, to make sure you don’t blow yourself up.”

I tense immediately. “It can blow up?” 

“Anything can blow up if you believe in yourself,” she says as reflex. Taking in my alarmed expression, she clears her throat. “Um, it’s not going to blow up. I’ve done this many times before, and I’ve only blown things up like three times. And they were all on purpose!”

“Why would you _want_ to blow something up?” I ask, immediately cringing at the hypocrisy of the question. I’d be a liar if I said I’d never had reasons to blow something up before and _did._

Thankfully, Harry Jr. doesn’t know me well enough to call me a hypocrite. “I mean, we kept a safe distance away,” she defends. “We were testing the limits of magically expanded space, and under what conditions would disrupt the enchantment. I made an expanded room out of a tent, and my friend threw some spells at it. Then we repeated and attempted to safeguard against what managed to disrupt the enchantment in the prior attempt.” Eb never would have allowed me to experiment in such a dangerous way, and I can’t formulate a way to express that before she tacks on cheerily, “It was for a Charms project!”

“So you had supervision…?” I ask, knowing the answer. That would change how I am envisioning the situation. Not that I can really talk much when it comes to explosions and fire, _but_ they’ve always been on accident or as a desperate measure.

“Oh--no, we just went outside in the snow with a tent and started. Hermione and Ron made some protective barriers for us just in case.” We notably do not have any protective barrier, and I hope we don’t need them. She flicks her wand with a final flourish, and lowers her hand. “Alright, let me check the stability of the room and put down some anchors.”

“What are you going to anchor it to?” I ask. Anchors, at least, are familiar to my style of magic. Long-lasting spells especially need anchors in objects or circles of power in order to last. 

“Well, I usually prefer using the stars as an anchor,” she says. “And--well, I don’t know if the stars are the same. So I’ll use a couple of these crow statuettes," pulling a couple, each no bigger than an inch, out of her pocket. I'm pretty sure she didn't have them before. I'm really more used to being the befuddler, not the befuddled. "Since brass reflects magic and they’ll sound an alarm if the enchantments going to wear off.” She taps each with her wand to animate them. “Two ensures that I won’t get crushed if the other anchor fails.”

“Is that likely to happen?” I ask, not enjoying that mental image at all. 

“Ah, no. These are quite safe.” She gives me a reassuring smile, but the idea of her being crushed to death if the spell collapses makes me entirely uneasy. 

“Can you make more anchors as an addition safeguard? Or,” I say, as I step into the room in question. It’s nice. The hardwood floor and wallpaper matches that in the hallway, and it’s a decent size. Bigger than mine, even. She even adds a window to the room as I investigate her spells. The window is an example of impossible physics, twelve feet into the street but with the same view as the living room. “I’ll have to add this room into my wards. We’ll need to…” I trail off, watching Harry Jr. carefully conjure a bed into existence. 

It even has sheets that are neatly folded. Stars and stones. 

“We’ll need to what?” she prompts when done.

I start. “We’ll need to make sure that your enchantments are compatible with my wards. If they’re not, then you’re gonna have to be on the couch,” I tell her firmly.

“Oh. Okay.”

Harry Jr. takes to a crash course in warding quite well. The room isn’t hard to add to my existing warding. It’s actually really weird how easily the room takes to my warding. 

When I mention my confusion, Harry shrugs. “Well, yeah.”

“Gonna explain any more than that?” I ask, when she seems content with that as an explanation.

“Er… I mean,” she says, rubbing the back of her head. “I made the room with the intent for a place of safety, so… why wouldn’t the magic accept some wards for more safety?”

“That’s--” Crazy. Magic was a force of nature. Without the proper protections, it would kill the caster just as well as anyone else. “Weren’t we just talking about the room collapsing on you if the spell fails?”

“Yeah, but it won’t,” she says, crossing her arms. “Even if it _did,_ the magics still got to go somewhere, don’t they? They aren’t just going to vanish. And I made them with protection and home and safety in mind, so the room might just get smaller and mess up the furniture. It’ll be fine.”

“But that’s not how magic work here,” I say, dizzy with this new information. “Magic doesn’t take sides. It’s dangerous. You have to take the proper steps to protect yourself.”

“I _am_ taking the proper steps to protect myself, it’s all about intent and meaning,” she snaps. Harry jabs her wand towards the wall, a dresser appearing out of the ether. After the dresser, a desk and chair. I step forward and run a hand on the surface of the dresser. It feels like solid, dark wood, with some artistic detailings on the edges. Upon closer look, the artwork appears to be of griffins. 

Harry Jr.’s magic is very different than mine, but adding details like that can’t be easy. 

I jerk back a bit when the wall in front of me changes color. I watch the patterns on the wall swirl and settle into geometric designs that disguise some runes very well, before I turn back to Harry. 

“My landlord would sure be surprised to find a second bedroom here,” I muse. The landlord would be surprised by a lot of things in my apartment. Keeping my research safe isn’t the only reason my secret lab is a secret. 

Harry Jr.’s brow scrunches. “Oh, I can make sure to put up an illusion on the door to keep it hidden when the landlord visits… does that happen often?”

I shake my head, “No, it’s nothing to worry about. I can handle that when it happens, and I always have a heads up.” The landlord sends someone by once a year to check the gas lines and the fire alarm, the former of which I never use and the second of which doesn’t last longer than five minutes in an environment with so much magic. I’ve gotten more lectures about checking the batteries for it than I can count. 

Harry surveys the room and nods to herself. Her composure is surprising but a relief. I don’t know much about teenaged girls, and even less about teenaged girl wizards, but I would have been useless if that conversation about suicide had gone much further. 

Stars, I’m responsible for a teenager’s welfare. What do teenagers need? She needs clothes. I’ll have to take her shopping. I’ll have to make sure to get enough food for the both of us, instead of ordering take out all the time. It’d be cheaper in the long run. 

I rub a hand through my hair and walk out to give Harry some more time to set up her room. I need to make a list. Clothes, food… toiletries. What else? 

Eb had given me the necessities to be fed, clothed, and clean and not much else. I had no time to be a teenager, and no one to be a teenager with. It had worked for me and kept my head firmly attached to my body, but that’s not possible living in a city. I wouldn’t want to isolate Harry like that anyway. 

So… should she go to school? Eb had taught me magic along with things like math and literature, but he hadn’t been that great at them either. I got my GED before I travelled around the country, but that’s it. Powerful wizards didn’t really _need _a lot of mundane education. We’re high in demand.

I’ll ask her. It’d help us blend in, at the very least. And it’d get Harry around kids her age, even if they won’t have much in common with her. Which… means she wouldn’t really make frineds there, would she? Didn’t Michael’s daughter, Molly, just start high school? Maybe Harry can go to the same school, so at least there’ll be one person who knows about magic. 

Maybe it’d be a waste of time. I could get her set up for homeschool. That would allow us to focus on her magical studies as well, and cut out any of the crap she’d get from a mundane school.

I rub my forehead again. I need to go to the library, look some things up. But I have a teenager to watch out for. 

“Would you be alright here on your own for a few hours?” I call out across the small apartment. From what I can see from the open door, Harry appears to be constructing her own bathroom. Well, that’d be convenient, considering the only bathroom in the apartment is connected to my bedroom. 

“Where are you going?” she asks, eyes wide and a bit alarmed.   
  
“Just to the library,” I say, “I need to look up some things.”

“Oh!” she says, brightening. “Can I come too? I want to look some things up myself.”

“Well, sure,” I say. I’d have plenty of time and ability to search what I needed. And it doesn’t matter either way. Searching for what I need legally speaking for a teenager in my care isn’t some secret. “Let’s go.”

…

Harry Jr. loves the library. The minute we step into the building, she relaxes, and darts off to the history section. 

I watch her leave, wondering what she’s looking for. Then I head over to the reference desk. I try to keep my magic tightly under lock and key so as not to short the electronics here. 

“Hi,” I say with a smile. The man at the counter smiles back. “Where can I find info on new guardianship and enrolling a teenager into a local high school?”

He doesn’t even seem surprised. “I can tell you that the Chicago public schools will need photo IDs, copy of a birth certificate, and proof of guardianship and residential address,” he says, twiddling the pen in his hands. “There may be other requirements depending on the school, like academic records and such. The easiest way would be to call the school or send them an email.”

Alright. Harry Jr.’s got none of those. And as a pseudo-Outsider, she wasn’t born anywhere on this planet. 

Or reality. She’s not an alien, though that would be cool. 

The librarian offered some parenting books, which isn’t what I meant about new guardianship info. I’m really not qualified to parent anyone. I just need a way to legally protect Harry Jr., and so there aren’t weird questions raised about a strange teenaged girl living with me. 

I thanked him, and meandered away. The library should have resources for people who are undocumented, but I can’t explain the situation. She came out of a portal, not from another country. 

What do we do without a single paper trail?

I can’t ask Ebenezar. He’d report her to the White Council. Susan wouldn’t know what to do. Murphy… might have an idea on how to get documents. But she’d demand to know why, and push until I tell her, and I doubt she’d believe me about Harry Jr.’s origins. It’s hard for me to believe, and I was a witness to her arrival. 

Sorting out my own paperwork when I hit eighteen was hard enough. I had to track down the hospital I was born at for my birth certificate. I had to go to bring my birth certificate to the Social Security office to get my social security number, and then I had to go to the DMV to get a driver’s license. And _that’s _the short version. 

We don’t need documentation, maybe. School isn’t really a great option, since Harry Jr.’s time would be better spent studying magic. She’s from a different world, so no one’s going to be looking for her. 

But… fuck. We need to have our bases covered. I know what the cops are like, I can’t have an underaged stranger staying at my place. People would jump to all of the worst explanations. Murphy would kick my ass and take Harry Jr. away, which would endanger both of them. 

I have enemies who would use the legal system against me too. Not being prepared for that is a weakness just begging to be exploited. 

So then the question is, who do I know who can help me illegally become the legal guardian of a teenager who’s unrelated to me?


End file.
